Some see our world today as an era of globalization while others view it as an age of the clash of civilizations. Whatever the case, the world is definitely getting smaller, and it is a fact that frictions are increasing as diverse peoples from different regions and nations come into contact with each other. Needless to say, such a situation calls for more and better mutual understanding between cultures. At a time when the rapid development of computerized media has made it possible for information to circle the globe instantaneously, mutual understanding between ordinary human beings simply cannot keep up. Instead, information reigns supreme, divorced from understanding, while frictions and contradictions multiply.
Western civilization has led modernity all across the globe. Be it science and technology, democracy, or capitalism, all were born in and spread from the West. It is no exaggeration to say that modernization has meant Westernization, and yet the region outside the West that has learned from and internalized Western civilization the most assiduously has been Japan and the other nations of East Asia. As a result, people in East Asia tend to boast a rather rich knowledge of Western culture and history, but it seems doubtful that Westerners know about East Asia to the same extent that East Asians know about the West.
As the region most distant from Europe, East Asia had few opportunities for interaction with Europe prior to the Middle Ages. But as one of the world’s oldest cultural spheres, and under the influence of China at its center, this region cultivated a unique translocal culture with features quite distinctive from those of either the Christian or Islamic cultural spheres. For one, no single representative religion like Christianity or Islam dominated in this region, and instead Buddhism, Confucianism, China’s Daoism, and Japan’s Shinto all coexisted side by side. China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam have frequently been referred to as the Chinese Character Cultural Sphere, and this is because instead of sharing a common representative religion, they made common use of sinographs (Chinese characters), the representative form of writing used over many centuries in the region.
As the only ideographic or logographic writing system remaining in active use in the modern world, sinographs are quite different from phonographic writing systems like the Roman alphabet or Arabic script. As one concrete example, the same sinographs are vocalized quite differently depending on the time period and place. As a result, techniques for reading texts written in sinographs—i.e., Literary Sinitic—also varied across different regions. Unlike Latin, the lingua franca of Europe in the past, and unlike English, the lingua franca in the present, Literary Sinitic had absolutely no function as a spoken language, and instead communication was carried out in writing via “brush conversations,” a method without precedent in other parts of the world. Moreover, in regions on the periphery of China, autochthonous phonographic writing systems like Japanese kana, Korean han’gŭl and Vietnamese Chữ Nôm were deployed alongside sinographs, and the resulting multiplicity of coexisting and intertwined writing systems was likewise unprecedented, lending further peculiarity and complexity to the profile of the East Asian cultural sphere.
On the basis of the unique features of this East Asian Sinographic Cultural Sphere, this book devotes special attention to the history of the techniques of “vernacular reading” that were used in Korea in the past, and that are still used to this very day in Japan, to read texts written in sinographs and/or in Literary Sinitic. In doing so, it attempts to contextualize and explain the differences between these various techniques with reference to the language ideologies of each region and the worldviews and ideas of the nation that informed them. Because at present both North Korea and Vietnam have abolished the use of sinographs, and even South Korea hardly uses them anymore, the Sinographic Cultural Sphere has all but unraveled and disappeared. Besides, under the influence of rapid Westernization people have largely forgotten by now the history of the former Sinographic Cultural Sphere. It was circumstances like these that suggested to me the need to revisit this history and dig deeper into it.
But the contents of this book are by no means easy to follow, even for readers hailing from East Asia. Thus, when Professor King first proposed an English-language translation of the book, I confess I had some doubts as to whether the contents could be made accessible to an Anglophone readership. I assumed that the specialized terminology and complicated symbols used throughout the book would render any English translation extremely difficult; indeed, I half suspected that the project would eventually be abandoned. Thus, I was truly surprised to receive an email from Professor King some years later informing me that the translation was complete. But it also occurred to me that if the contents of this book could be made known to some extent to an Anglophone readership, this might make a modest contribution to addressing the task facing us all today of intercultural understanding. No prospect could make me happier as the author than this. But whatever influence this English-language edition may have, equal credit must surely go to Professor King and his team of translators, and I thank them for their efforts.
Kin Bunkyō
March 1, 2017, Kyoto